Event: SDFO Meeting – Tuesday, November 21, 2017 at 6:00 pm

In 2000, inspired by the work then underway for the San Diego County Bird Atlas, Scott Tremor began to assemble a team of local experts with the goal of producing a parallel compendium on the county’s mammals. At the time Tremor was a mammal keeper at the San Diego Zoo, and start-up funding from the Zoological Society of San Diego enabled the team to coalesce. As the time this project would require became clearer, in 2004 Tremor moved from the zoo to the San Diego Natural History Museum to increase his effort toward this goal. San Diego County’s catastrophic fires of 2003, however, provided an important opportunity to study the effects of fire on local mammal communities. Then from 2008 to 2014 the museum’s department of birds and mammals undertook a resurvey of the San Jacinto Mountains, retracing the expedition of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in 1908. Though diversions, these studies and others over the past 15 years generated so much new perspective that a publication based on data available in 2000 would be antiquated by 2017. Nevertheless, gaps in our understanding of San Diego County mammals remain wide, as the states of knowledge and research needs highlighted in this atlas emphasize.

Scott Tremor is a mammologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum. His expertise with mammals, especially rare rodents, spans both southern California and Baja California. This local experience and relationships with the experts in the region have helped bring this book to completion.